Talk:Singularity

From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.

I moved this article back from Quantum singularity to Singularity. Some articles link to the second one directly, even this article has links to a microsingularity (no "quantum"). Seems easier for searching purposes and avoids the problem of having a redirect where otherwise might be place for Singularity (episode). -- Cid Highwind 20:03, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)

• I modified the article to account for the difference in usage in Star Trek (and real life too) between a "black hole" and a "singularity". Aholland 21:23, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• I also removed the following for personal commentary and conclusions:

'Star Trek writers are quite fond of black holes. They write about them constantly, but they are often described or used inaccurately.

Lawrence Krauss has identified possibly the most objectionable abuse of black holes in a story, which occurred in a Voyager episode in which the crew found a "quantum fissure" (crack) in the event horizon of a black hole, through which they escaped. He was quite amused by this blunder, and described it several times in "The Physics of Star Trek". Without parroting him, I will only say that it is impossible for an event horizon to have a crack.

Another serious error is that black holes are assumed to magically "suck in" everything around them. When the crew of the USS Voyager first encountered the Hirogen, they deactivated the "containment field" around a quantum singularity and it immediately "sucked in" every starship in the vicinity, except for the Voyager itself which barely escaped. However, a black hole's gravity field does not possess any unusual properties once you get outside of its event horizon. The strength of the gravity field is determined by the mass of the black hole, and an object can potentially orbit the black hole just as it would any other object. Only a fairly large star will collapse into a black hole, but once a black hole is formed, it will remain a black hole even if it gets quite small. A small black hole (such as the one in the Voyager episode) can potentially have much lower mass than a planet, and correspondingly low gravity. It is even possible that small, primordial black holes exist within our solar system right now, beyond our ability to detect them.